Hard disk vs. solid-state drive

SSDs (Solid State Drive) are the newest form of storage on the market. They can replace the hard drive in your laptop, which has moving parts, therefore being subject to damage. SSDs are faster, but cost more than a traditional hard drive.

Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning there are no moving parts. Because there is no actuator arm and read/write head that must seek out data on a platter like on a hard disk drive (HDD), they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data.

But SSDs are also much more expensive than their hard-disk drive (HDD) counterparts, which offer 300GB of capacity or more for less than $100.